


X-Misfits

by rionaleonhart



Category: Misfits (TV 2009), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-18
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2019-07-07 07:31:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15903714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rionaleonhart/pseuds/rionaleonhart
Summary: X-Men: First Class/Misfitscrossover. Charles and Erik are looking for other mutants. They're going to regret finding these five.





	1. Recruitment

“I can’t believe we’re even discussing this,” Curtis says. “Do you not remember what happened last time we got taken to a place for people like us?”

The others look blank.

“Er, last time we what?” Alisha asks.

“Of course you don’t,” Curtis mutters. “Never happened.”

“The milk guy,” Simon says, quietly. He’s sitting a little way back from their circle, speaking only rarely; he would be almost unnoticeable were it not for the sense of unease seeping out of him, curling around their chairs, so thick Charles finds it difficult to imagine the non-telepathic amongst them can’t feel it. “Curtis saw him kill us. In the future.”

“Oh,” Nathan says, as Charles feels recognition dawn for Kelly and Alisha, “is _that_ why we killed him?”

Everyone whips around to stare at Nathan. Simon looks petrified.

“It’s all right,” Charles says, after quickly glancing through Curtis’ mind – he seems the most reliable source here – to find out exactly what happened. “There are others with us with, let’s say, less-than-pristine backgrounds. This is a place where you can leave all that behind.”

To his right, he hears Erik laugh under his breath.

Kelly is still staring at Nathan. “You _helped us kill him_ and you didn’t know why?”

“It was a long story!” Nathan protests. “I stopped listening around the part where I didn’t get a handjob. I was just going with the flow.”

“Er,” Charles says, somewhat thrown. “Well, all that aside, if you’ll consider—”

“Look,” Kelly interrupts, suddenly shifting her gaze to Erik, “I get it, all right? One of us is him.” She jerks her head towards Nathan. “But can you stop thinking we’re all idiots, because it is really getting on my tits.”

“Charles,” Erik says, standing up, “may I have a word?”

-

“They are going to hold us back or get us killed,” Erik says.

“You can’t know that.”

“Such reassurance,” Erik sneers. “You can see inside their minds. If they are not as shallow and idiotic as they seem, tell me.”

Charles hesitates. “They can learn,” he says. “Anyone can.”

“I’m not here to teach children how to count. It’s a waste of time we could be spending on more worthy students.”

“More worthy?” Charles asks, raising his eyebrows. “Can you imagine what an asset a mutation like Curtis’ might be? Imagine if you were able to turn back time, erase your mistakes—” and he cuts himself off at the flash of Erik’s memories, and there’s a moment of cold silence on every level.

_I’m sorry_ , Charles thinks.

_Amazing, isn’t it_ , Erik thinks – as if to himself, but Charles isn’t fooled, and Erik clearly isn’t expecting him to be – _how thoughtless a man whose powers revolve around thought can be._

“Then we take Curtis with us,” Erik says aloud, robbing Charles of the opportunity to respond, for which Charles is almost grateful. “He is the least objectionable, after all. Simon is a coward, but we may be able to use him. We don’t need the others.”

“What do you mean, we don’t _need_ them?”

“If I asked you to let Alisha use her ability for its obvious purpose, what would you say?”

Charles looks evenly back at him. “And what is its ‘obvious purpose’?”

“Distraction. Clearing a path.”

“I would say no, as you knew before you asked. It’s far too dangerous.”

“Then her mutation is useless. Why recruit her?”

“There’s a future for us after Shaw,” Charles says. “We’re not a military force, Erik.”

“If we want to survive,” Erik says, “we will be.”

-

“All right,” Alisha says, when they return to the hall. “We’ve decided to go with you.”

“Excellent,” Charles says, with a smile. _Not a word_ , he mentally whispers to Erik. Kelly may be able to hear Erik’s thoughts on their recruitment, of course, and if so she may share them with the others; Charles has to hope she possesses more diplomacy than he can currently credit her with, having been told to fuck off the moment he’d originally started talking about genetic mutation.

_Of course the one missing would have a useful mutation and half a brain_ , he hears Erik think, which perplexes him; he hadn’t noticed an absence. He casts his eyes over the group.

“Simon decided he’d stay behind,” Curtis says, noticing him looking. There’s something awkward about his thought patterns, at odds with what he’s saying. “I don’t know where he’s gone.”

And Charles realises why he hadn’t noticed the missing party; he may not be able to see Simon standing there, but he can still feel his anxiety, hanging in the still air of the room like smog.

“If we’re going to be honest with each other,” he says, “as I think we should if we’re to work together, I should point out that there’s little use in turning invisible to spy on a telepath.”

Simon blurs back into existence, looking mortified.

_Fools_ , Erik thinks, pointedly. _Fools and children._


	2. Training

Nathan wakes in a pool of his own blood and quite possibly piss. When he raises his head, he sees that Magnet Man or whatever his name is is still there, leaning against the wall, flicking the bloodied knife from hand to hand without ever actually touching it.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” Nathan demands.

“Do you always take that long to wake up?” Captain Magnitude asks.

“I don’t know how long I was dead for, do I?” Nathan asks, dragging himself to his feet. “I was _dead_.”

“Observation it is, then,” Magnetface says, and a twitch of his fingers sends the knife shooting into Nathan’s gut.

“You _cunt_ ,” Nathan manages to choke out before he keels over again.

-

“I think my mutation should give me the mental fortitude to resist yours,” Charles says, “but just in case: the door of that box will only open from the inside. Even if I try controlling you, you’ll have to step away from me to open it, so we’ll break contact. Your mutation stops working the moment contact ends, doesn’t it?”

Alisha nods. Charles can see her breath condensing against the clear plastic of the box wall.

“You will be completely safe,” Charles assures her. “Are you sure you’re prepared to do this?”

“Yeah,” she says, her voice dampened slightly by the barrier between them. “If there’s a chance we can find out how to, like, switch it on and off or something, I want to do the tests. I mean, you’d think it would be fun, but after a while...”

Charles nods. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Alisha breathes out slowly. “Right,” she says, and then she reaches out through the slot in the box wall and takes hold of Charles’ wrist.

Charles’ mind goes completely blank, and there’s a high-pitched ringing in his ears, and then he finds himself desperately struggling out of his trousers. He freezes.

When he looks up, Alisha is leaning against the inside wall of the box, her eyebrows raised.

“How’s that mental fortitude working for you?” she asks.

Charles finds he can’t meet her eyes. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“You wanted to come down my throat and call me Raven,” she says. “If you’re curious.”

She could be lying, and God he hopes she is, but the idea of going into her mind and hearing what he actually said is so mortifying he can’t bring himself to check.

-

“He said you can change yourself to look like anyone.”

“You mean Charles?”

“Yes,” Simon says. “He said it’s your mutation.”

That’s not exactly what Raven would call her mutation. It’s only part of her mutation, at least. But right now she doesn’t feel strong enough to show Simon her natural form and see him recoil. Instead, she takes Simon’s shape. “I can,” she says in his voice.

Simon’s eyes widen very slightly. “Can you,” he says, and then, “do you – if someone asked you to, uh,” and then he turns around and leaves.

Raven reverts to her preferred form and watches him go, confused.

-

Charles scrubs his hands over his face. “I don’t know how we can test his ability if he can’t activate it at will.”

“But we know what does activate it,” Erik says. “Intense regret. Mortal danger.”

“Not consistently. He told me that he couldn’t turn back time the first time Nathan died.”

Erik shrugs. “I can imagine his death would be a difficult thing to regret.”

Charles gives a small, not-quite-appalled laugh. “Erik, you can’t say things like that about our students.” He flicks his mind across Erik’s and frowns. “And you can’t continue to push them off satellite dishes, either. Regardless of testing, we are not putting Curtis in mortal danger.”

-

Kelly is the first one he approaches after the cure goes wrong. Maybe he’d been imagining it, but he felt there had been a sort of rapport between them when he had been trying to teach her how to use Cerebro; she had stopped swearing at him eventually, at least. And he can’t talk to Raven now, not after what he said to her.

Besides, Kelly can hear his thoughts, so maybe it’ll be easier to convince her he’s still Hank than it might be with some of the others.

_Don’t panic, okay?_ he tries to kind of think in her direction as he approaches. _It’s me._

“Hank?” Kelly asks, turning around.

“Uh,” Hank says, painfully aware of how strange and clumsy it feels to speak with his new mouth, “hi.”

There is a long silence. Kelly, unsurprisingly, stares.

“Sorry,” Hank says, because he doesn’t really know what else he can say.

“ _You’re_ Hank?”

“The cure I was developing,” Hank says, awkwardly. “It didn’t—”

“For fuck’s sake!” Kelly snaps.

Hank falls silent, taken aback.

“Just once,” she growls, “can a guy I like just not turn into a monkey?”

-

“Seriously,” Nathan says, massaging his abused skull, “do you have to keep doing that?”

“You need training,” the Mighty Magnet says. “Every second you spend dead is a second wasted. If you practise enough, you may learn to revive yourself more quickly.”

“And what if that’s not possible? How do we work that out?”

Magnetizor shrugs. The knife is weaving slowly between his hands. Nathan hopes it cuts his fingers off. “We continue until I get bored.”

“You know, you can just tell me if this is some weird wank-fantasy thing for you. Nobody’s judging. This is the twenty-first century, after all. And I do look like this.”

The knife thunks into his ribs, and as he gasps for breath he hears Mr Magnetificent mutter, “Next lesson: century numbering.”


	3. Confrontation

“Wait,” Curtis says, on the eve of what may be a third world war. “What year is it?”

Erik gives Charles an incredulous look, but Charles isn’t entirely surprised; he has seen inside these students’ minds, after all, and he’s had an impression for a while that they’re not from this time. “It’s 1962,” he says.

Curtis puts a hand to his head. “Okay, I definitely remember learning about this. There was some kind of thing about missiles in Cuba.”

“The Cuban Missile Crisis,” Simon puts in.

“Right,” Curtis says.

At the edge of his vision, Charles sees an obviously bemused Nathan look at Kelly, then at Alisha. Both girls shrug. That’s reassuring, in a way; if not everyone in the future knows about the events of tomorrow, they can’t be as catastrophic as feared. Still, if time travel is possible they have no guarantee that the past cannot be changed.

“So d’you think that dickhead sent us back in time to, what, stop the missile crisis thing from happening?” Alisha asks.

“But there wasn’t any war,” Curtis says, frowning. “We don’t need to be here to stop it.”

“Perhaps it’s a stable time loop,” Simon says. “Perhaps there was no war because we were here in the first place.”

Charles, curious, examines Curtis’ memories to find out exactly what the circumstances of the dickhead sending them back in time were. There’s not much. They’re all at Curtis’ home, lounging around and mostly smoking, when a man appears in their midst. Curtis demands to know what he’s doing there. Kelly says, ‘He’s been watching us.’ Nathan calls him a pervert. And then the man waves a hand, and they all wake up in 1962.

Kelly said he had been watching them. Charles looks at her. Perhaps she was able to glean something more from his thoughts.

He’s barely brushed her mind before it slams shut.

“Oh, my God, _stop doing that_ ,” Kelly snarls, glaring at him. “Can’t you ever just fucking ask first?”

She has a point, he knows, but he still feels vaguely aggrieved. _What do you make of this?_ he asks Erik instead, sending him the scene from Curtis’ memories.

The flareup of Erik’s mind is immediate and overwhelmingly loud. It brings back memories of Shaw, of the camp, of his mother. He must recognise the man.

“We should talk,” Charles says quickly, putting a hand on Erik’s shoulder to steer him out of the room. Kelly is staring at Erik now, her mouth slightly open in horror, and Charles feels a twist of guilt; he never meant to publicly expose something so personal about his friend.

-

“You knew him,” Charles says. They are sitting in tall chairs opposite each other, Charles leaning forwards, his hand on Erik’s knee. _Feel that. You’re here. You’re not there any more. You’re here._

“Braun,” Erik says, not looking at him. “He was with Shaw, when—” He pauses. “I killed the others. He must have time-travelled to escape. I didn’t know he was a mutant.”

“So we can assume he’s not our friend, then,” Charles says, frowning. “Did he want them to end up here? Does he think having them on our side will ensure our failure?”

“Why else would they have been so close by?” Erik asks. “Five mutants within twenty miles of Cerebro? We couldn’t have missed them.”

“But I don’t think they’re planning to sabotage us.”

Erik looks back at him. More recent memories are unspooling in his mind now: Kelly saying, ‘Wait, I thought Cuba was in Africa’; Nathan insisting that he kill one of the others for fairness whilst Erik points out that, for them, it would be permanent. “I don’t think they need to try.”

-

This is the day that could save the world or destroy it. Charles walks through the cabin of the aircraft, making sure that everyone is there and wearing their suits. Erik: present. Raven: present. Hank, Moira, Kelly, Alisha, Simon: present. Nathan: clearly hungover (Charles hadn’t actually told them not to drink the night before, granted, but he’d rather thought it went without saying) but present. Curtis – Curtis?

“Curtis?” Charles asks. “Forgive me, but you’re not looking terribly well.”

Curtis is holding onto the side of the cabin as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright. When Charles peers into his mind, it’s too tired and jumbled to make any sense of.

“Curtis?”

“ _This_ time,” Curtis mumbles, the words blurring into each other, “we’re gonna get it right.”

-

One significant day in October 1962 lasts at least a week, although only one person knows it. In the end, when Curtis has managed to prevent Nathan from distracting Hank so much he swerves into the rising submarine, when he has persuaded Alisha to stay strapped in her seat before the plane crash-lands, it all comes down to the beach.

-

The missiles are speeding away from the beach. Curtis watches the struggle between Charles and Erik, his heart thumping so hard he’d almost swear someone had replaced it with an angry sledgehammer. Nobody’s died yet. Well, nobody who matters. And they’re so close to being safe, and maybe he’ll finally be able to go somewhere quiet and _sleep_...

The others are standing a little farther forward, also watching, before Nathan, impossibly, _loses interest_ in the life-or-death conflict in front of him and sidles closer to Raven.

“So,” Nathan says, just loudly enough for Curtis to hear, as he rests his elbow on Raven’s shoulder, “as we’ve all just had a near-death experience, what do you say you and I...” and then he makes an incredibly obscene gesture with his tongue.

Charles must overhear Raven’s mental reaction to that or something, because he glances back, distracted, just for a second.

Too long.

The missiles slam into the ships.

Shit. _Shit_.

Everyone on the beach is frozen, staring at the flaming wreckage. Curtis feels on the verge of throwing up from frustration. “Nathan, you twat, what did you have to do that for?”

“Oops,” Nathan says, turning pale; then, plaintively, “Okay, I could _not_ have predicted that. And they were trying to kill us!”

That’s true. Any chance of people accepting mutants has now gone completely to shit, but maybe this is an outcome Curtis doesn’t have to regret enough to rewind time. Maybe he can finally get out of this day.

“ _What the fuck do you think you’re doing?_ ” Kelly demands, storming up to Erik like a mouse that thinks it’s a lion.

Or maybe not. Curtis has a bad feeling about this. “Kelly, get out of there!”

When Agent MacTaggert begins firing, Erik raises a hand and deflects the bullets with no effort at all. The first sinks into Kelly’s neck mid-tirade; everything slows down around Curtis as he sees her choke on her own blood, and then there’s the now-familiar blur of time running backwards and—

-

The missiles don’t hit the ships the next time, but Agent MacTaggert still fires, and the bullet thuds into thin air and there’s a tiny confused pause before Simon reappears, wide-eyed and bleeding and terrified, dying because Curtis _told him to distract Erik_ and Alisha is screaming and—

-

The moment the missiles slow to a stop above them, Curtis grabs Agent MacTaggert’s gun and empties all the bullets into Nathan’s head.

Erik jerks around at the noise, and the missiles fall, and _wait shit_ —

-

Erik looks up as he cradles Charles in his arms. Curtis can barely focus, but the desperate fury in Erik’s eyes still holds him. “Turn back time.”

Curtis actually giggles, swaying on his feet. “Probably was gonna do that anyway,” he says, or something along those lines. He thinks something along those lines. He’s not really aware of what he’s saying any more.

“Turn back time,” Erik commands, lifting a hand, and the world _is_ blurring but Curtis isn’t sure it’s the right kind of blur, “or—”

No, definitely wrong blur. Threats are going to have to wait.

Curtis passes out.

-

“Hello,” Charles says, when Curtis visits him in the hospital. “Hank tells me you’ve been asleep for almost two days.”

Curtis nods, not quite looking him in the eye. “It was – you know, it was a long day.”

“Mmm,” Charles says. “Longer for you than for the rest of us, I think.”

There’s a pause, and then Curtis looks at him properly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I could have stopped it. I just couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, you know?”

Charles doesn’t respond at first, looking through Curtis’ memories of that day. It takes a while.

“Well,” Charles says, eventually, “it could have been worse.”

Curtis manages a slight smile at that.

Later, when Charles is sifting through what he learnt from Curtis’ memories again, noting the various factors that could have _made_ it worse, he reaches the conclusion that Erik was probably right about Braun’s motives.

He decides, on balance, not to mention that to the group.


End file.
